Did Michelle Pfeiffer really hate her ‘Grease’ role “with a vengeance”?
The esteemed American actor Michelle Pfeiffer made an emphatic lurch to superstardom in 1983 following her appearance opposite Al Pacino in Oliver Stone’s crime masterpiece, Scarface. Her lofty position was consolidated later in the decade by stand-out roles in The Witches of Eastwick, Tequila Sunrise and Married to the Mob.
Before her pivotal role as Elvira Hancock in Scarface, Pfeiffer had made small ripples in television roles. However, she may not have caught Stone’s attention had she not landed Grease 2, her first major movie role, in 1982.
As the highly-anticipated sequel to 1978’s Grease, the movie starred Pfeiffer as the new Pink Ladies leader, Stephanie Zinone, opposite Maxwell Caulfield’s Michael Carrington. Despite proving instrumental in Pfeiffer’s early success, the movie failed to live up to expectations as a commercial and critical flop.
While appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2019, Pfeiffer recalled her fortune in landing the role. “It was a total fluke that I got that part. My agent told me just to go,” she said. “I wasn’t a dancer, I wasn’t a singer, and I was in this little short purple skirt with gogo boots.”
“We had these dancing auditions, and it was literally like A Chorus Line. This line goes, and then the next line goes, so I kept sneaking in the back. Finally, it was only me, and I did. I did get the part, shockingly enough.”
Like the critics, Pfeiffer appeared unenthusiastic about the ill-conceived sequel. “I hated that film with a vengeance and could not believe how bad it was,” she reportedly told Hollywood in 2007. “At the time, I was young and didn’t know better… I hear it’s a cult movie now.”
However, when Buzzfeed used the above quote in a retrospective article, Pfeiffer responded in a post on her Instagram page. The actor claimed that her comments were taken out of context and asserted gratitude to the movie for its role in her early rise to prominence.
“This project is and has always been so special to me and my history – One should never trust a publication to get quotes right if they can’t even bother to spell the person’s name correctly,” she wrote in her Instagram story.
Watch the trailer for Grease 2 below.
